Denmark
Denmark, country occupying the peninsula of Jutland (Jylland), which extends northward from the centre of continental western Europe, and an archipelago of more than 400 islands to the east of the peninsula. Jutland makes up more than two-thirds of the country’s total land area; at its northern tip is the island of Vendsyssel-Thy (1,809 square miles square km), separated from the mainland by the Lim Fjord. The largest of the country’s islands are Zealand(Sjælland; 2,715 square miles square km), Vendsyssel-Thy, and Funen(Fyn; 1,152 square miles square km). Along with Norway and Sweden, Denmark is a part of the northern European region known as Scandinavia. The country’s capital, Copenhagen (København), is located primarily on Zealand; the second largest city, Århus, is the major urban centre of Jutland. Loves Food , Legos , History By about 12,000 BC, as the climate warmed and the great glaciers of the Pleistocene Epoch (about 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago) were receding, the first nomadic hunters moved into what is now Denmark, bringing tools and weapons of the Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age) with them. Shell mounds(refuse heaps also known as kitchen middens) reveal the gradual development of a nomadic hunter-gatherer society, whose tools and weapons continued to progress in sophistication and complexity. Beginning in the 4th millennium BC, during the Neolithic Period (New Stone Age), a peasant culture emerged in Denmark as the people living there further developed their stone tools, began keeping livestock, and adopted agriculture. Those first farmers began to clear land in the forests for fields and villages, and after about 3500 BC they built large, common, megalithic graves. By about 2800 BC a single-grave culture emerged, but whether this shift indicates a change in local custom or another group moving into the area is not clear. In the last phase of the Stone Age in Denmark, the so-called Dagger period (c. 2400–1700 BC), flint working reached its apogee with the production of technical masterpieces, including daggers and spearheads modeled after metal weapons that were being imported at the time. The growing wealth of the region, particularly of the elite portion of society, in the Bronze Age (c. 1700–500 BC) is illustrated by the fine metalworking skills seen in the spiral decorations on the bronzes of the period—notably the famous Late Bronze Age lurs (long curved, metal horns, often found in pairs), created about 1000–800 BC. During the same period, increasingly varied and improved tools, such as the bronze sickle, enabled better exploitation of cultivated areas. It was also during the Bronze Age that woolen cloth began to be produced in Denmark. (Sheep raised prior to this period were used for their milk and their meat rather than for their wool.) After 500 BC, bronze was gradually replaced by iron, and a more complex village society developed in a landscape of bogs, meadows, and woods with large clearings. Iron Age farm buildings, generally smaller than those of the Bronze Age, appear to have been moved every generation or so, and the empty plots were then cultivated. That buildings might be reerected on former plots suggests that the population remained in a given area. Objects of great value, as well as people, continued to be laid as offerings in the bogs. The so-called Tollund Man, the well-preserved body of an Iron Age man found in 1950 in a bog near Silkeborg, Den., is probably the most famous of these discoveries. Along with evidence of human offerings, there are indications that slavery was practiced during this period. More-or-less-fixed trading connections were established with the Romans during the Iron Age, and by about AD 200 the first runic inscription appeared—likely inspired by the Etruscan alphabet of northern Italy and possibly also influenced by the Latin alphabet. The Late Iron Age (c. 400–800) appears to have been a time of decline and unrest, and, in the 6th century, bubonic plague raged. Toward the very end of the Iron Age, the first trading towns appeared at Hedeby (near what is now Schleswig, Ger.) and Ribe.